So I guess they’ve evacuated Shanghai and no one bothered to tell me. Typhoon Wipha has landed in Shanghai and reportedly, to paraphrase from a BBC report, shit is gonna get fucked up. Winds are expected to hit 155 miles per hour and dump 55 millimeters of rain, however much that is. This is no regular typhoon. Seriously. The Shanghai Meteorological Bureau issued a yellow alert this morning. A yellow alert! The only alerts more ominous than yellow are orange and red ones. And what it means is that Typhoon Wipha has been upgraded to a “super typhoon.” It also means that my Adidas windbreaker that I call on for rainy days will probably not do the trick. It also means that more people will probably die as a result of being impaled by umbrella spokes on the way home from work than from the typhoon itself. The AP quoted “the man who answered the phone at the city’s meteorological bureau” as saying, “The typhoon is very likely to develop into the worst one in recent years. We are still observing it. It’s hard to say at this moment.” What we do know is that 200,000 coastal residents in Shanghai have been evacuated as a precaution and that my dinner plans tonight are fucking shot. There is only one question that remains: what on God’s green earth does “Wipha” mean? In America we have things called “hurricanes” with normal names like Andrew and Hugo. No such luck around here. Flumesday’s chief meteorological expert tells me that Wipha is a name for a Thai girl. Tuesday, and potentially for the next two days, this Thai girl will be bringing a different kind of “boom-boom” to Shanghai.

•BBC: Typhoon Alert Shanghai Evacuated
•AP: East China Braces for Fierce Typhoon

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